When I was growing up, adults told young girls that ‘boys tease you because they like you.’ This was supposed to help us endure the insults and abuse that 8 and 9 year old males heaped on us for existing. Apparently boys weren’t capable of being polite or interested in our activities and so demonstrated affection by being mean to us. More than 50 years later and it still doesn’t make sense to me.
This Quillette piece from 2019 could have been written by any adult in my hometown, even though the author is 14 years younger than I am. The author describes how she learned sooooo much from being sexually harassed by the line cooks at a 24-hour-restaurant where she was a hostess and cashier at the age of 15. I found it linked at this place, about which more later.
The author, Marilyn Simon, grew up to be a Shakespeare scholar at the University of Toronto. In 1991, however, she was a 15-year-old girl working at a thoroughly inappropriate job. First, because she was FIFTEEN. That’s too young to have any job more arduous than babysitting. Further, this job was at a 24-hour restaurant, where it appears from the piece she wrote that she occasionally worked after midnight. Violations of labor laws always make for an inspiring part of a memoir.
So, she’s in a place that she never should have been in the first place, and where she’s subjected to what she, herself, describes as “relentless sexual harassment: comments on my figure, sexist jokes and innuendo, and outright sexual propositions. The kitchen was staffed by coarse young men, all around their mid-twenties, who were clearly gratified by teasing a sweet young girl with their vulgar running commentary.” Her description of her obviously terrible experience illustrates one of the most common right wing rhetorical tactics: universalizing from her own experience.
Her reaction to this bullying is to celebrate how strong it made her. Her substack indicates otherwise. Still, it’s her experience to describe and I have no way to determine its validity. That said, the fact that she describes it now as positive doesn’t mean anyone else would. In fact, she acknowledges that some of the customers were threatening. “Rarely, but occasionally, at the end of a shift, one of these men would still be lounging in a booth, drinking coffee and smoking without much else going on. I don’t know if any one of these guys ever posed an actual threat to me or to my female co-workers. We never took the chance to find out.” She never quotes any of those female coworkers. She also describes some of the customers as ‘real pigs,’ although she indicates that she always managed to humiliate such men by use of her ‘feminine virtue.’1
This superpower — her word — consists of her ability to refuse sexual advances. So long as she says no, the men behave. She implies that this super power is available to all women who follow her example. The vulgar men she knew stopped when she said no; therefore, all vulgar men will stop when any other woman says no. This is the logical fallacy of 'Faulty Generalization.'
I began to understand that feminine virtue instructs men in masculine virtue. At times, I returned a sexual comment not with another insult, but with an eyeroll, and sometimes I’d assert myself not by outdoing a dirty remark, but by activating codes of gallantry and manliness. A blush and a quiet “Alright. That’s enough,” would change the tone of the kitchen banter entirely. In contrast to the dining room where a polite separation existed between staff and customers, in the kitchen intimacy was displayed not just through insults but also through gentleness, and through gentlemanliness—and all it took was a blush! Resting on my feminine “weaker” nature was the way to control the social dynamic of the “toxic masculinity” of the back of house culture.
She avoids openly stating that women who suffer assaults deserve it. She does, however, state that SHE was able to control men by her wit and skill.
Yet what I learned that summer was the opposite: my feminine virtue, traditionally understood, allowed me to control men. Women throughout the centuries have not primarily understood themselves as victims of patriarchal oppression—all one has to do is look to Jane Austen’s plucky heroines, or Shakespeare’s witty bar-wenches, or Chaucer’s sexual dynamo the Wife of Bath.
I note that her examples there are all fictional. The fates of those women was in the hands of their authors, not random men out in the world. Shakespeare is the world’s most beloved poet for excellent reasons, but he wasn’t an anthropologist. Men in the real world are not controlled by an author’s didactic intention. Her behavior protected her ONLY because the men she worked with decided against doing anything to her. The power was entirely theirs; her ‘virtue’ would have been worthless had the men really wanted to attack her. She had no agency whatsoever and to suggest otherwise is the worst kind of victim blaming.
Nothing in her article demonstrates the falsity of her generalization more than her discussion of the class relations between her and the men in the kitchen. She was the daughter of a civil engineer going to private school; they were high school dropouts and ex-cons. She was going to college and they were not. While nothing in her text says this specifically, it is not unreasonable to conclude that everyone knew that her family would make a stink if anything really bad happened to her, and so behaved accordingly. She protected less by her ‘feminine virtue’ than by her father’s ability to hire a lawyer or make the cops listen to him.
The worst part of her class-blindness is that she doesn’t think these men could be expected to behave better. She repeats that the kitchen was a place to escape the propriety of the dining room, as though high school dropouts cannot learn good manners. This is indeed the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations.’ These men were working a dead-end low paid job with godawful hours, but in exchange they get to make gross sexual comments to a teenager. That’s not a good trade.
She acknowledges that some people might object to a workplace culture of aggressive depravity.
Of course, a reasonable objection to the kind of sexually saturated culture I’m describing here is that an individual should be treated as a professional in their job, not as any kind of representative of gender and certainly not as a sexual object. Professional androgyny is the ideal. Yet I can’t think of a more Orwellian nightmare than everyone becoming reduced to their job, to their function in the service of… what? Corporate gain? Bureaucratic convenience? To their utility? As though the highest aim of humanity is to be treated as the mere conduit of some professional task?
Well, yes, actually. At work people should be doing their jobs at their jobs in a state of ‘professional androgyny,’ if only to protect those of us who don’t have Ms. Simon’s armor against constant abuse. She seems to forget that people have actual time away from work, where they can behave in whatever non-criminal manner they wish. Further, there were almost certainly men in that place that would have preferred their shifts without some jerk making awful comments about the jailbait cashier’s ass. The boss probably preferred his employees to behave in a way that didn’t invite lawsuits. Simon’s personal quirks and preferences are much less important than the functioning of the restaurant.
Simon’s failure to note that other people exist — a common problem with right-wingers — is most glaringly obvious in what academics call her ‘heteronormativity.’ She never acknowledges even the possibility of men who aren’t far on the butch scale in appearance and behavior. If the kitchen staff make a habit of harassing the female staff, what would they do to a femme man? Men can sexually harass other men, even when the harassers are not gay. In fact, Oncale ruled that sexual desire isn’t even a requirement for a case based on a hostile work environment. Simon’s solipsistic view of her work actually makes life worse for anyone else working at that place. 2
This might have been an interesting memoir if Ms. Simon had spent some effort into researching sexual harassment cases. There is an interesting sociology study analyzing class and gender relations in service industry work. (Cooking is usually women’s work, so there’s already an interesting gender angle Ms. Simon never explores in that the men who were bullying her were themselves doing something normally coded for women.) There is an even more interesting discussion of why we accept rudeness from men in low-class jobs as a psychological wage instead of paying them a better real one and also demanding better behavior. Instead, we got a hazy memory of a 15-year-old trying desperately to be the Cool Girl still.
She’s a professor of English literature, so I’m sure she’s read Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, one of the dullest collections of words in the entire English language, which tells the story of a housemaid who manages to capture the attention of her boss by refusing to have sex with him despite his persistence. The story she tells in the Quillette piece follows the outlines of the Richardson novel, but is, thank all the gods, much, much shorter.
Another group Ms. Simon ignored are those ex-cons. She was 15 at the time, and sex with a 15-year-old in almost every state is a felony. If she had accepted the propositions of an ex-con, she would have sent him back to prison, even if the relationship had been consensual. That seems like something she should have noticed.
Aside from your clear point that all of her examples of women fending off men were fictional, I hope she doesn't have tenure as a professor, as "Shakespeare's bar-wenches" shows a poor understanding of the sadness of Doll Tearsheet, Mistress Quickly, Maria, etc. Why not Queen Elizabeth herself as a model? Oh, and as another reader who despises Pamela, I suggest Fielding's Shamela as a chaser to Richardson's nonsense.